Do big cats like Marmite?

August 31, 2012 • 10:27 am

That’s a question I’m sure has been preying on your mind forever. (In case you don’t know what Marmite is, it’s a repellent brown goo made from yeast extract and salt.) I have to admit that I can’t abide the stuff, and don’t understand how anyone can, though I’ve seen Brits eat it with relish. (Not really—they eat it plain on toast).  And I know that I’ll be inundated with complaints from Marmitophiles, so remember that taste is a subjective thing. Some folks love the digusting stuff.

But what about big cats like leopards and tigers? Would they like it? Big Cat Rescue has the answer, and you’ll see in the following video.  I must say, though, that cats have better taste than Brits!

The most common response seems to be disgust, often accompanied by a flehmen response, in which animals open their mouth after detecting a scent, exposing the odor-detecting Jacobson’s organ in the roof of the mouth.  You may have seen your own cat do this, and it’s very common when cats smell the urine left by other cats.  I conclude that, to these large felids, Marmite smells like piss.

Apparently no cats were harmed in the making of this video, but they easily could have been!

h/t: Michael

The New York Times reviews Hitchens’s final book

August 31, 2012 • 10:11 am

In today’s New York Times Christopher Buckley appraises Hitchens’s last book, Mortality (you can buy it for $13.79 on Amazon). It’s short (104 pages), and collects the 7 pieces about his cancer Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair, plus a last chapter of unpublished jottings, some of which I’ve posted before.  Here’s another:

“My two assets my pen and my voice — and it had to be the esophagus. All along, while burning the candle at both ends, I’d been ‘straying into the arena of the unwell’ and now ‘a vulgar little tumor’ was evident. This alien can’t want anything; if it kills me it dies but it seems very single-minded and set in its purpose. No real irony here, though. Must take absolute care not to be self-pitying or self-centered.”

Many of us have read the Vanity Fair pieces, and know how good—and heartbreaking—they were, but the book has two other essays:

“Mortality” comes with a fine foreword by his longtime Vanity Fair editor and friend Graydon Carter, who writes of Christopher’s “saucy fearlessness,” “great turbine of a mind” and “his sociable but unpredictable brand of anarchy that seriously touched kids in their 20s and early 30s in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson had a generation before. . . . He did not mind landing outside the cozy cocoon of conventional liberal wisdom.”

Christopher’s devoted tigress wife, Carol Blue, contributes a — I’ve already used up my “heart-wrenching” quota — deeply moving afterword, in which she recalls the “eight-hour dinners” they hosted at their apartment in Washington, when after consuming enough booze to render the entire population of the nation’s capital insensible, Christopher would rise and deliver flawless 20-minute recitals of poetry, polemics and jokes, capping it off saying, “How good it is to be us.” The truth of that declaration was evident to all who had the good fortune to be present at those dazzling recreations. Bliss it was in those wee hours to be alive and in his company, though the next mornings were usually a bit less blissful.

“For me,” he writes in “Mortality,” “to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.”

Indeed.

Christopher Hitchens (Oct. 7, 2011) . He died on Dec. 15. Photo  byMichael Stravato for The New York Times

Francis Spufford strikes again: defends his faith against atheism

August 31, 2012 • 6:25 am

Francis Spufford must be deeply disturbed by New Atheism.  His conciliatory letter to atheists in New Humanist has, within a week, morphed into a long, semi-coherent tirade in the Guardian against nonbelievers: “The trouble with atheists: a defense of faith“.  His main concern is to justify his faith in the absence of evidence, but also gets in a few licks at atheists.  His main points are three:

1.  The atheist bus slogan is stupid.  The slogan, you may recall, is “There is probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.”  This really rankles Spufford, but not for the reason you think. No, it’s not the “probably there is no God” part, for Spufford thinks that such a claim is buttressed by no evidence (see point 2 below). No, he objects to the implied dictum that the goal of our life is to enjoy it.  Here’s where he loses it:

I’m sorry – enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error. But not necessarily an innocent one. Not necessarily a piece of fluffy pretending that does no harm. The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place, that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn’t and can’t be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible. If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you’d think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. And you’d think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus, with the minor difference, in this case, that the man from the Gold Blend couple has a tiny wrinkle of concern on his handsome forehead, caused by the troublesome thought of God’s possible existence: a wrinkle about to be removed by one magic application of Reason™.

I don’t think Spufford is enjoying his life.

But suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, you are povertystricken, or desperate for a job, or a drug addict, or social services have just taken away your child. The bus tells you that there’s probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, and now the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it’s true, is that anyone who isn’t enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. What the bus says is: there’s no help coming. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think there’s any help coming, in one large and important sense of the term. I don’t believe anything is going to happen that will materially alter the position these people find themselves in. But let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing “cruel optimism” 1,500 years ago, and it’s still cruel.

I don’t think he quite gets the point of the slogan. It’s not that by abandoning God we’re suddenly going to have all kinds of fun. It’s that by abandoning God and discarding the crutch of belief, we increase our well being, in Sam Harris’s sense. We aren’t shackled by guilt because we’re gay or have masturbated, or that we’ll go to hell; we no longer think that our actions are being observed by the Great Leader above. What Spufford and Augustine call “cruel optimism” is what we atheists call “realism.”  Yes, a poor person or a drug addict may find some consolation in believing in God, but they’re not going to improve their situation by belief alone. They have to do something, because God is not going to cure their addiction or give them money. No, there is no help coming from above, but there may be help coming from one’s society or government. That’s precisely why those countries with the best social services have lower levels of belief.

Suppose the bus slogan said instead, “You are going to die, so enjoy your life.” That’s a denial of hope, too, but it’s the truth, and the realization of our mortality should impel us to squeeze the most juice from the orange of our lives. It is good for us to know that, and not good for us to think that we’ll be immortal, either on this earth or after death.  There’s no hope coming there, either, so we must make the best of it.

But maybe there is an afterlife? Spufford’s second point is that religious claims may well be true because we can’t prove otherwise.

2. Atheists can’t prove there’s not a god. As he notes:

New Atheists aren’t claiming anything outrageous when they say that there probably isn’t a God. In fact they aren’t claiming anything substantial at all, because, really, how would they know? It’s as much of a guess for them as it is for me.

. . . And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me. No, I can’t prove it. I don’t know that any of it is true. I don’t know if there’s a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn’t the kind of thing you can know. It isn’t a knowable item.)

The absence of a God is a substantial claim because if there is a god—at least a benevolent and omnipotent and theistic one—we should have evidence for it.  We have none.  So it’s more than just a guess, it’s a reasonable working hypothesis based on observations like the absence of miracles or of God’s intervention into the workings of the world, the existence of unwarranted suffering, the lack of efficacy of intercessory prayer, and the general observation, from science and common sense, that the universe works exactly as it would be if there were no god—at least a god who does anything.

Really, Spufford’s assertion here is like saying that one might as well believe in leprechauns because we can’t prove they don’t exist. It’s the “you can’t prove a negative” argument, which is and has always been wrong: first because you can prove a negative (you can “prove”—in the scientific sense of “finding strong evidence against existence”—that I am not President of the University of Chicago), and you can draw strong inference that something doesn’t exist if there should be pervasive evidence of its existence but there isn’t. The absence of gods is more than a “guess.”

3.  Atheists don’t understand that belief derives from and rests on emotion, not evidence. So why, in the absence of proof of god, is Spufford such a strong believer? (He says that he is “a fairly orthodox Christian” who, every Sunday, says that he says and does his best “to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions.”) It’s because, as he argued in his New Humanist letter, he thinks that acceptance of religious facts comes from emotions, rather than the other way around.

To show this, he recounts in gory detail a long fight he had with his wife.  With their squabble unresolved, and roiling with emotion, Spufford repaired to a cafe for a cappuccino.  And there he heard, on the cafe’s sound system, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. That made him somehow realize that. . . well. . . something fuzzy:

I had heard it lots of times, but this time it felt to me like news. It said: everything you fear is true. And yet. And yet. Everything you have done wrong, you have really done wrong. And yet. And yet. The world is wider than you fear it is, wider than the repeating rigmaroles in your mind, and it has this in it, as truly as it contains your unhappiness. Shut up and listen, and let yourself count, just a little bit, on a calm that you do not have to be able to make for yourself, because here it is, freely offered. There is more going on here than what you deserve, or don’t deserve. There is this as well. And it played the tune again, with all the cares in the world. . .

And this emotion led him to believe that he apprehended some kind of truth that Mozart had inserted into the Concerto:

I think that Mozart, two centuries earlier, had succeeded in creating a beautiful and accurate report of an aspect of reality. I think that the reason reality is that way – that it is in some ultimate sense merciful as well as being a set of physical processes all running along on their own without hope of appeal, all the way up from quantum mechanics to the relative velocity of galaxies by way of “blundering, low and horridly cruel” biology (Darwin) – is that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love.

Well, that’s a huge conclusion to draw from listening to a concerto, and other people listening to the same piece would derive other conclusions. Who’s right?  What really happened to Spufford is that he was soothed by that music, and it stimulated a set of emotions that calmed him down and (presumably) led him to settle the fight with his wife. The same thing happens to atheist.  And, claims Spufford, the same emotions that led Spufford to realize Mozart’s “report on reality” have led him to God.  The emotions come first, and then the belief:

I think that love keeps it in being. I think that I don’t have to posit some corny interventionist prod from a meddling sky-fairy to account for my merciful ability to notice things a little better, when God is continually present everywhere anyway, undemonstratively underlying all cafés, all cassettes, all composers.

That’s what I think. But it’s all secondary. It all comes limping along behind my emotional assurance that there was mercy, and I felt it. And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me. No, I can’t prove it. I don’t know that any of it is true. I don’t know if there’s a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn’t the kind of thing you can know. It isn’t a knowable item.) But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove. I’d be an unrecognisable oddity if I did. Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn’t susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn’t checkable against the physical universe.

The problems with this are too many to analyze.  First, as both I and Eric MacDonald have emphasized, Spufford is analyzing his own journey to belief and assuming that it goes for the whole world. Most people aren’t believers because they have a revelation or epiphany that leads them to faith: they believe because they were taught to believe as children.  If you’re brought up in Pakistan, you’ll be a Muslim; in the Southern U.S., perhaps a Baptist; in southern India a Hindu. Why, precisely, did Orthodox Christianity rather than Judaism come “limping along” after Spufford listened to Mozart?

And that leads us to the second point: for the vast majority of believers, emotion doesn’t precede acceptance of religious truths. Instead, it’s the other way around: you’re often brainwashed into accepting those truths, and then the emotion follows when—as John Haught so often emphasizes—you let yourself be “grasped by faith” and transported into the realms of superstition.

Third, for most of the world’s believers, truths do matter, as Spufford admitted in his New Humanist letter. If Spufford knew with certainty that Jesus wasn’t really the son of God, would he still be an “Orthodox Christian”? Just as Mozart’s Concerto inspires different emotions in different listeners, so does religious “inspiration” (more likely brainwashing) lead different people to different faiths, all of which make incompatible claims.

Maybe we’re in the habit of entertaining emotions we can’t prove (if “proof” is something that even applies to an emotion!), and yes, emotions can certainly be misleading. If faith really is based on emotions, then 66% of the world’s population (those who aren’t Christian) have been misled.  So even if there is a God, the chances that Spufford is right about his faith are no more than one in three (much less if you count all the different types of Christians). But again, for most people the facts (or the brainwashing) precede the emotional commitment, and so those facts matter.

Finally, it hardly needs to be said that religion is not a private thing. If it were, Spufford’s fuzzy emotional experience would just be a mundane tale of someone deluded by a concerto in a cafe, and I wouldn’t care about it. But religion isn’t private: the faithful, feeling that they have apprehended God’s truth, often feel they must impose it on others: through proselytzing, through making laws about sex, abortion, and homosexual unions, through flying planes into buildings and throwing acid in the faces of schoolgirls, through claims about the inefficacy of condoms in preventing AIDs which lead to much suffering and death, and through instilling lifelong guilt and sexual reticence in adherents. Even the Amish, whom many see as religiously innocuous, bring up their children in an austere way of life, not offering them much of a choice except for a brief Rumspringa.

If Spufford is going to defend a faith based on emotion alone, let him face up to all the harm that those emotions have caused.

Astaire Week Grand Finale: Four easy pieces with Ginger Rogers

August 30, 2012 • 4:02 pm

Ginger Rogers (1911-1995) appeared in 11 films with Fred Astaire and was paired with him in more than 35 numbers. She is, by far, the partner most often associated with Astaire.  She wasn’t as adept a dancer as, say, Rita Hayworth, but compensated for it with her charm and acting ability. As one commenter said on an Astaire/Rogers video, Ginger wasn’t the best dancer with Fred, but she was Fred’s best partner.

To learn a lot more about the duo, read the “Astaire and Rogers: 1933-1939” section of the Wikipedia entry on Ginger Rogers, along with the first paragraph of the “after 1939” section.  There’s really too many good YouTube clips to present, and it took me a long time to choose (click here if you want to see them all). I wanted to concentrate on their dancing, so I’ve excluded the wonderful singing videos like “The Way You Look Tonight” (1936; watch it!) from my choices below.  The four clips do, however, show the range of their dancing skills, from tap to waltz (and roller-skating!), and their onscreen chemistry that made “Astaire and Rogers” a household phrase.

I’d like to thank my friend (and editor) Latha Menon for reactivating my interest in Astaire and his partners, and for drawing my attention to some of their best work onscreen. I hope you’ve enjoyed the past x days, where x represents a number I can’t recall.

First, we have “Hard to handle”, (1935; sometimes called “Too hot to handle”), from the movie Roberta. Latha describes it as “a relaxed fun dance, with pleasant banter between the two first, showing their onscreen charm as a couple”:

“Let’s call the whole thing off” (also know as “You say tomato, and I say tomahto”) was written by George and Ira Gershwin especially for this movie: Shall we Dance (1937).  A lover’s quarrel turns into a duet on rollerskates (remember when they had two fore-and-aft pairs of wheels?)

“Waltz in Swing Time” (from Swing Time; 1936, music by Jerome Kern) demonstrates the full range of their dancing skills; it’s a lovely piece. As Wikipedia notes:

“Waltz in Swing Time”: Described by one critic as “the finest piece of pure dance music ever written for Astaire”, this is the most virtuosic partnered romantic duet Astaire ever committed to film. Kern—always reluctant to compose in the Swing style—provided some themes to Robert Russell Bennett who, with the assistance of Astaire’s rehearsal pianist Hal Borne, produced the final score. The dance is a nostalgic celebration of love, in the form of a syncopated waltz with tap overlays—a concept Astaire later reworked in the similarly impressive “Belle of New York” segment of the “Currier and Ives” routine from The Belle of New York (1952). In the midst of this most complex of routines, Astaire and Rogers find time to gently poke fun at notions of elegance, in a delicate reminder of a similar episode in “Pick Yourself Up”.

“Isn’t this a lovely day?” is from Top Hat (1935), with music written by Irving Berlin (the movie also introduced the famous song “Cheek to Cheek”).  Again, Wikipedia gives some good notes on this dance:

In “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to be Caught in the Rain)”, while Rogers is out riding, a thunderstorm breaks and she takes shelter in a bandstand. Astaire follows her and a conversation about clouds and rainfall soon gives way to Astaire’s rendering of this, one of Berlin’s most prized creations. Astaire sings to Rogers’ back, but the audience can see that Rogers’ attitude towards him softens during the song, and the purpose of the ensuing dance is for her to communicate this change to her partner.The dance is one of flirtation and, according to Mueller, deploys two choreographic devices common to the classical minuet: sequential imitation (one dancer performs a step and the other responds) and touching. Initially, the imitation is mocking in character, then becomes more of a casual exchange, and ends in a spirit of true cooperation. Until the last thirty seconds of this two and a half minute dance the pair appear to pull back from touching, then with a crook of her elbow Rogers invites Astaire in The routine, at once comic and romantic, incorporates hopping steps, tap spins with barrages, loping and dragging steps among its many innovative devices. The spirit of equality which pervades the dance is reflected in the masculinity of Rogers’ clothes and in the friendly handshake they exchange at the end.

Larry Moran reviews Shapiro’s anti-Darwinian book; and another new anti-evolution book is about to appear

August 30, 2012 • 9:06 am

I’ve been criticizing James Shapiro’s HuffPo columns on neo-Darwinism (he sees it as all wrong) for a while now, but only recently noticed that for some time Larry Moran has been making more thorough criticisms of Shapiro’s columns and his recent new book at Moran’s website Sandwalk. You can find Larry’s comments collected here.

As you may know, Shapiro’s beef against the modern theory of evolution is that it neglects sources of variation that have been discovered only in recent years, e.g., hybridization, genome rearrangement, and capture of genes from distantly related organisms. He sees these, in a way that he’s never specified, as the drivers of evolution, neglecting or denigrating well-understood processes like natural selection and genetic drift.

In fact, Shapiro’s criticisms of natural selection as an important component of evolution resemble those of creationists or advocates of intelligent design, which explains why he’s been taken up as a “pet biologist” by The Discovery Institute.  Although he’s never produced an alternative to natural selection for producing adaptations like, say, the eye, Shapiro seems to have an almost teleological view of how evolution operates, as if—and Larry points this out—organisms have immanent within themselves the ability to guide their own evolution.

Now Larry and I don’t agree on everything.  Whenever I mention natural selection, for instance, he usually raises genetic drift as a plausible alternative, even for complex features like the genitals on a fish’s head. My own response would be that such complex features couldn’t evolve by genetic drift or as spandrels or maladaptive traits, but Larry does keep me honest by holding the specter of genetic drift before my eyes.  He’s also done hugely valuable work in attacking creationism, and, hey, I have to like anybody who drives me to the best poutine in eastern Canada.

Larry has put himself further on the good side of the ledger by writing a critical review of James Shaprios’s book, Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, for Reports of the National Center for Science Education (download free at link). If you want to see why Shapiro’s criticisms of the modern theory of evolution don’t hold water, go read it.  I’ll quote just one small bit:

The novel part of Shapiro’s model is that these cell-directed genomic changes are targeted and goal-oriented, leading to the view that cells design their own future. This view replaces the “traditional” view that “inherited novelty [mutation] was the result of chance or accident.” If this sounds a lot like “facilitated variation” or evolvability, then, congratulations, you’ve been keeping up on your knowledge of modern discussions of evolutionary theory. Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart have described a similar concept in their 2005 book The Plausibility of Life, but others have also talked about it over the past few decades. Are there any references to those ideas in the 1162 articles cited in this book? No.

This brings me to the second thing that distinguishes Shapiro from most other critics of the Modern Synthesis. He does not want to be identified as an advocate of “intelligent design” creationism and yet he protests a bit too much. His writings sound an awful lot like those of some “intelligent design” creationists, but Shapiro prefers a “third way,” as he first described in a Boston Review article (1997). His way isn’t creationism but it’s not exactly science either because he postulates a kind of evolution that has a goal, or purpose. He claims that one can investigate natural genetic engineering from a purely scientific perspective without invoking the supernatural. But if that’s true, then why don’t scientists routinely invoke goal-oriented processes? It’s because they have a philosophical bias against religion, according to Shapiro.

. . . Shapiro, like [Richard] Sternberg, is widely admired in the “intelligent design” community and there’s a good reason for this. This book is highly critical of old-fashioned evolutionary theory (neo-Darwinism) using many of the same silly arguments promoted by the Fellows of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Those fellows are dead wrong and so is Shapiro.

Virtually all of the non-creationist opposition to the modern theory of evolution, and all of the minimal approbation of Shapiro’s views, come from molecular biologists. I’m not sure whether there’s something about that discipline (the complexity of molecular mechanisms?) that makes people doubt the efficacy of natural selection, or whether it’s simply that many molecular biologists don’t get a good grounding in evolutionary biology.

And now we learn that another respected philosopher (Jerry Fodor was the first) has come out against neo-Darwinism, too: the distinguished philosopher Thomas Nagel is about to issue Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature is Almost Certainly False. The Amazon blurb is, well, disturbing:

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.

Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.

Nagel’s skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.

In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.

First Fodor, then Nagel: what is going on with philosophers and evolution? But remember that Nagel chose Stephen Meyer’s pro-ID book Signature in the Cell as his “book of the year” in The Times Literary Supplement,and has defended ID.  

I’ve ordered Nagel’s book and will review it either here or somewhere else.